linguistic and cultural areas that are both opprobrious in and of themselves and ridiculously inappropriate for a prestigious undertaking such as textual commentary. This joke is repeated throughout. Roots employed for such mnemonics include h-b-l (“foolishness,” “raving”), kh-l-b-ṭ (“causing malicious trouble; confusing”), th-q-l (“heaviness; boorishness”), and many others.
Al-Shirbīnī also follows the grammarians’ habit of using words of a given pattern or measure of long and short syllables (wazn) to disambiguate that of the word under discussion. Again, for comic effect, he employs the technique of using as disambiguators words of mundane or undignified connotation. Thus “kūz (‘mug for water’) is of the pattern of būz (‘muzzle’) because its wide mouth resembles the muzzle of a cow or a calf” (vol. 2, §11.3.4) and “jubnah (‘piece of cheese’) [is] of the measure of ubnah (‘passive sodomy’)” (vol. 2, §11.26.3), and so on.
Al-Shirbīnī also provides spurious etymologies for many words. For example, he claims that ma-ḍāl (“he ceased not to” or “he kept on” (doing something)) derives from ḍall (“error”) or ḍalāl (“delusion”) or ḍaʾīlah (“slender snake, viper”). Not only are these etymons incorrect (ḍall and ḍalāl derive from the root ḍ-l-l, ḍaʾīlah from ḍ-ʾ-l; ḍāl, a strictly colloquial form, might be considered to derive from ḍ-w-l or ḍ-y-l but historically derives from z-w-l with conflation of this root with ẓ-l-l), they also exploit the technique of ridicule by association used with regard to the meters. On occasion, these false etymologies are elaborated into lengthy flights of whimsicality, as when al-Shirbīnī provides four possible etymons, all entirely spurious, for the word qarrūfih (a sort of vessel) (vol. 2, §11.3.5). In support of such etymologies al-Shirbīnī often invokes the authority of the nonexistent dictionary Al-Qāmūs al-azraq wa-l-nāmūs al-ablaq (The Blue Ocean and Piebald Canon), a title reminiscent of al-Fīrūzābādhī’s famous Al-Qāmūs al-muḥīṭ (The Encompassing Ocean) and perhaps other lexica (see n. 126).
Similar are the “paradigms” (maṣādir, singular maṣdar)70 with which al-Shirbīnī sometimes completes his analysis of a given word, mimicking the lexicographers’ habit of using these to establish the base forms of the conjugation. Thus, according to the author, the maṣdar of ḍāl is “ḍalla, yaḍillu, ḍalālan, and ḍāllun and maḍlūlun” (§5.2.2); in reality, however, this paradigm is that of the verb ḍalla (“to go astray”), which bears no etymological relationship to the word under discussion. Other paradigms contain made-up, humorous, or eccentric forms that may contain coded references (see, e.g., n. 243) or serve to introduce further vulgar, obscene, or inappropriate words to bolster the comic impact (see, e.g., vol. 2, §11.2.8).
Probative quotations (shawāhid) are also used, as is standard in sharḥ, to lend authority to the commentator’s statements. Not all of these are themselves opprobrious or ridiculous. The use of a well-known quotation such as that attributed dubiously by al-Shirbīnī to Maʿn ibn Zāʾidah—“We are a tribe whom the wide-eyed pupil / Melts . . .” (§5.2.13)—for instance, relies for its comic effect simply on the incongruity of its occurrence in the context of a verse in the course of which the beloved declares “I’m off for a crap.” Others, albeit obscene or playful, may be quotations from contemporary poets whose wit the author admires and may be used for their congruity with the matter at hand (as, e.g., “I saw a leper deep down in a well” (§5.2.16)). Still others, however, seem to be invented simply to make fun of the implied tendency of some commentators to use shawāhid to say in verse what they have just said in prose, e.g., (following discussion of the etymology of the words in question (§5.5.4)):
Khabṭ from khubāṭ derives
And ḍarṭ from ḍurāṭ likewise.
Perhaps the weightiest of the conventions of commentary that al-Shirbīnī puts to comic use is the heuristic rhetorical debate in which the author first poses and then responds to and dismisses an objection to an argument he has put forward earlier. Al-Shirbīnī usually refers to such a passage as a “debate” (masʾalah), which he generally characterizes as “silly” (habāliyyah), though he sometimes uses the opening “If it be said . . .” (fa-in qīla . . .) or a variant, a wording that led to the technique being named fanqalah. A typical “silly debate” occurs in the author’s discussion of a metaphorical usage of the phrase “cutting out” as used to refer to the action of the lover’s fingers in removing (figuratively) his heart from his breast: “Why does he talk of ‘cutting out’ with the fingers, rather than with a knife or a razor, given that it is of the nature of cutting that it should be done with a sharp instrument and, the heart being flesh, cutting it with the fingers or the fingernails would not work?” We reply: “The fatuous response is . . .” (§5.5.14); for an example of fanqalah, see §5.5.12.
The Logical Absurdities of Grammar
The notion that the relationship between the real world and grammar was not arbitrary seems to have been commonplace in al-Shirbīnī’s time. There is no reason to think that he is being humorous when he says that a certain Sufi shaykh (of whom he approves) is “by nature attracted to the feminine, to the extent that he would eat only from a zubdiyyah (‘bowl’) [and] drink only from a qullah (‘water pitcher’)” (§6.6) (these words being grammatically feminine), or that a man would describe his wife as being “so modest that she covers her face from the moon [qamar, grammatically masculine] and from everything else [grammatically] masculine” (§7.31).
This is taken to an extreme, however, when al-Shirbīnī first contends, for example, that all lice are female because the word qamlah (“louse”) is grammatically feminine and then uses this argument to explain that the louse cannot jump because “the louse . . . is . . . female, and the female is weaker than the male” (vol. 2, §11.2.3). Similarly, he implies elsewhere that, because the word liḥḥīs (a sort of vermin) is related through their common root to the word laḥīs, and because the latter may be coupled with the word taʿīs (“miserable”) in the phrase taʿīs laḥīs (for which al-Shirbīnī gives various meanings, all unpleasant), the creatures known as liḥḥīs are themselves rendered more harmful (vol. 2, §11.2.2). Likewise, al-Shirbīnī contends that there is “a certain appropriateness” to the fact that the written word kishk (“groats formed into balls”) reads as a palindrome in Arabic because “their bottoms are just like their tops, and the beginning of each piece of kishk is the same as its end” (vol. 2, §11.10.11).
In such absurd applications of grammar to life, al-Shirbīnī probes the limits of linguistic logic in pursuit of comic effect, propelling himself into a world where grammar is fundamental and life incidental; that is, where life imitates grammar. While the reader may laugh, he can also hardly fail to notice the intrinsic absurdity of such arguments, which may, in turn, lead him to question the sanity of the discipline in whose name they are produced.
Subversion versus Affirmation
The tendency of the techniques described above to make textual commentary itself appear comic raises the possibility that al-Shirbīnī actually intended to subvert the genre and the literary culture from which it grew. Other elements in the work also point in that direction.
On occasion, for instance, al-Shirbīnī seems nonchalant toward the very process of commentary. Thus, baṭṭāṭ (“to pat out”) is derived “from baṭbaṭa . . . or from biṭaṭ . . . or, quite possibly, from sheer stuff and nonsense” (vol. 2, §11.21.5). It may also be significant that three of the “miscellaneous anecdotes” that make up the penultimate
